


A Wraith on a Horse

by gryfeathr



Category: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers | Ronin Warriors
Genre: Blood and Violence, Gen, Historical Figures, Historical Inaccuracy, Historical References, Losing an eye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gryfeathr/pseuds/gryfeathr
Summary: In Sengoku Era of Japan, also know as the Warring States Period, there was a minor family that served the Kodera clan of Himeji Castle. What history didn't write was how their white-haired son lost his eye, and what happened after.A Rajura-centric musing on his place in historical times.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/gifts).



> Dear Yuletide Recipient,
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me the excuse to sit and think and research about YST again. Its an old love and the excuse was a gift in itself.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this ahistorical historical musing. Various historical references are used and abused in this fic, which will be detailed later for the curious. 
> 
> For now, you just need to know Jirougorou Kuroda is the original name given for Rajura in the canon source books.

Jirougorou staggered backwards, throwing up the edge of his blade through instinct rather than precision. The pain screamed through his face and his vision was awash with blood, but years of training followed by a young adult life on the battlefield kept him going. His body knew the motions better than his mind, following the briefest flash of sun off metal as the only cue for where to put his sword.

The defensive position would last only moments - it was already fraying as he was pushed backwards through the mud sucking at his legs - he had to do something else. He threw his sword aside and dove in under the arc of his opponents cut, the vortex of shouting and grunts of death swirling around him. His wakizashi gripped in his hand, he dodged right, to the outside of the opponent’s movements, and then in. Like a common thief, he stabbed through the open lacing on the man’s armor and into his guts. 

There’s a certain feeling to knowing you’ve killed another person, and Jirougorou could feel when he cut the man’s life from this world of stench and struggle. He sliced outward and dragged himself back, feeling rather than see the man gurgle and drop to his knees. 

“Lord Kuroda!” The shout came through his ears tinny and echoing. Jirougorou wiped his short dagger blade off his own arm, sheathing it before casting for his sword. The thunder of a platoon of men crashing through the conflict and around him pushed back the sound of battle, creating a strange bubble of calm. He felt the hand of his retainer, Hachimatsu, grab his elbow and irritably shook him off. His fingers curled around the hilt of his sword and he rose, unsteadily, to his feet.

“They snuck in like dogs. I should have known,” Jirougorou said, baring his teeth. He grabbed Hachimatsu by the arm, mostly by feel, and dragged him in close. “We have no time to loose. We can draw them into poor ground, sound the retreat.”

“We need to get you off the field,” Hachimatsu said, and he sounded pale, even if Jirougorou could not currently see him.

“No. Find me a horse,” Jirougorou said, tightening his grip. “The ghost of Kuroda will lead them to their death.”

Hachimatsu sucked in a breath through his teeth.

Jirougorou forced himself into patience. He’d practiced it through his life; from childhood as a brilliant but pale and fragile child, to coming of age under the shadow of war and a brilliant strategist cousin, and guiding his brother and his men through a winding series of battles to protect their claims and fulfill their duties to the Kuroda clan. Blood dripped down his face and lips, washed down his chin, and the world spun around him, but still he waited.

It had always served him well. Spider-like patience had won them more than a few battles. It had saved many lives, and it would again, if Hachimatsu would just hurry up.

“A horse! A horse for Lord Kuroda!” Hachimatsu thundered, and Jirougorou didn’t need to force a grim smile.


	2. Chapter 2

Later, Jirougorou would hear the description of his ride from one of his many older brothers. He would hear in whispers how the enemy had run after the retreating ranks, arrows sailing through the sky in fits and starts and their shouts echoing off the hills. The way Jirougorou had appeared on top of a blood-splattered, dark horse, like a wraith of pale hair and broken armor, one of the dead gotten back up off the ground to confront the enemy.

How an entire army had balked at the sight of his bleeding face and matted hair, then ran after him as he rode into the river swollen with the summer rain in their unsettled fear. Only then to be broken as his brother’s platoon came charging in after, catching them against white water and silver swords.

Jirougorou had nearly drowned, washed off his horse in the crashing river. He’d clung to the horses bridle with fingers gone numb from the cold and shock from his injury, and he was drug out only because the horse’s sense of self-preservation had been stronger than the current. He’d stumbled back into the camp and had nearly been shot full of arrows himself, until the camp guard had recognized his pale hair and started shouting for the surgeon.

“You’re lucky you only lost an eye, Jirou,” said his older brother, sitting at his bedside. A camp bed was poor consolation prize for a harrowing win, but it had still been a win, and Jirougorou refused to remain lying down. He had a rickety camp table dragged up next to him, and while he convalesced in an old kimono from the bottom of his trunk, he still worked. Maps were spread out around him, and the letter he intended to pass on to their Uncle Shigetaka was half written in his elegant, narrow hand. 

“And we weren’t slaughtered,” Jirougorou reminded him dryly. “Your scouts need replacing. Or are they all dead?”

His brother shot him a narrow look. It was difficult to remember that he had a good side to his vision, and he practiced by keeping his second oldest brother inside it. His brother’s face was worn, but his dark hair was perfectly pulled back and the blood had been scrubbed out of the collar of his kimono and the padded kote over his shoulders and arms. 

“You always had a dark sense of humor,” he said, excusing Jirougorou’s comment. “No, we have perhaps a third of them. We have to send you back home, Natsuchiyo. You’re in no shape to keep fighting.”

“You’ll die if you do,” Jirougorou told him lightly, ignoring the childhood name.

“We won’t,” but even his brother’s certainty had wavered. 

“We need to move camp.” Jirougorou ignored him and leaned over the map, drawing him into conversation about tactics and positions. They needed to press the advantage, but they were short on men. They argued, Jirougorou insisting that there were ways to make it appear as if they had twice as many of their number if they played their cards correctly, his bother arguing that if it didn’t work they’d lose everything.

“That’s always the chance, brother,” Jirougorou said, frustrated.

“Enough. Rest, little brother,” said his brother, getting to his feet in a rattle of lacquer and metal. “We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

“It will be too late,” Jirougorou warned, but his brother wouldn’t be swayed. Jirougorou let him leave, but that left him with just the throb of the wound in his face and the unsettled rustling of the night. He looked down at his hands, flexing them, and felt the skin pulling at the stitches in his face as he frowned. 


	3. Chapter 3

He’s clinging with grim determination to the reigns of his horse and the edge of the saddle. He will name the horse later, but for now it is his nameless accomplice. The water churns black from the mud torn at it’s banks and white from where it crashes against itself. Even if there were a bridge, the rain-swollen river would have torn it away. As his horse balks at the edge, he can hear the shouting of an army at his back. Fear is a heady chaser to adrenaline, and they will chase him mindlessly if it means a certainty to their victory.

He shouts and pulls his wakizashi. It flashes in the corner of the horse’s vision, startling it, and it plunges forward into the river. Its sides heave under his knees and Jirougorou can only cling as the water reaches up to the horse’s chest almost immediately. Everything is dark except for a narrow part of his vision on his right side, but its all mostly just motion. The foam at the horse’s mouth. The screaming. The large chunk of tree carried along the current that sweeps him off the horses back.

Jirougorou wraps his numbed fingers in the straps at the horse’s chest and the cold shocks the air from his lungs. He goes under. He fights for the surface but it is far away, very far away, and he is battered back and forth like the boats at Obon. For a stunning moment he doesn’t even feel the throb of the missing eye. Its just black, and cold, and black.

Part of him wryly observes that he’ll not die due to a sword slipping past his guard and into his face; he will die by drowning, because he is an idiot pulling one last trick in a series of tricks.

_You have a strong will, Kuroda_

The voice floats out of the space between living and dying, somewhere in the rush of the river. It’s deep like the riverbed and thunderous like the tide, filling up Jirougorou’s head.

_You want to live more than anything, do you not?_

Of course he did. Only a fool would choose death meaninglessly. 

_I can give you power. But you must prove that you have the will to live, to fight, to have ambition._

What a strange request, and a stranger offer. Power and living went together.

_Ha! A fine way of thinking. Live!_

Jirougorou fights for the surface. His lungs are burning and his body is numb and feels like it belongs to a corpse. He heaves himself close to the horses side as it fights for the shore a long distance down river. He breaks through to the air and coughs of water through his mouth and nose. He breathes. His lungs fill with hard-won air.


	4. Chapter 4

“The eye patch looks good on you, Cousin,” said Kodera Yoshitaka in Himeji some weeks later. Their childhood had been a long time ago, but they had sat at the feet of the same teachers in the shadow of Himeji Castle’s rising walls and had competed for the honor of being called clever. Yoshitaka was five years older than he was, had already been hailed as the strategic genius of his age while Jirougorou had only just cut his hair into a proper soldier’s style. Now Yoshitaka would be married in a few days, head of the clan, while Jirougorou remained a minor branch family member. 

Jirougorou took in Yoshitaka, who he remembered better as a gangly fifteen year old with knobbly knees named Mankichi, and smirked at the fine orange kimono with its seasonally appropriate patterns dyed into the fabric. It was finely made, as befitted the head retainer of the Kodera family castle. A few years different, and their positions might have been switched.

“I find it serves me well.” Jirougorou took in the sweep of Himeji Castle’s finished tangled of curtain walls and building complexes. From here in the main keep’s top floor, he could trace the winding pattern of hallways and approaches designed to send an approaching army into fraying circles. It did not protect the keep because it was merely strong, or because the walls were high, or because its defender’s were superior; it worked because it fooled the enemy. It worked because it was clever. The Castle his clan had rebuilt for their Kodera masters was one of the safest places in all the world, and it was where Jirougorou had been sent to convalesce after the last series of victories. Incidentally, it meant he could attend his cousin’s wedding.

“Have you gotten your strength back for your sword? You must leave your left open,” Yoshitaka commented, casually, as they stood together. 

Jirougorou gave an elegant shrug on the blind side.

“That makes the opponent predictable,” he said as disarmingly as he could manage. “They all think its a weakness, so they go for the left side in all the same way.”

“Fine enough.”Yoshitaka chuckled. “I heard them calling you a ghost.”

“You can’t catch a ghost,” Jirougorou gave Yoshitaka a flash of teeth. “You aren’t the only clever one, Mankichi.”

“Cleverness and preparedness go together in victory,” Yoshitaka mused. “I find myself in need of a ghost. Perhaps while you recover, we should talk about what a ghost might be able to do.”

Jirougorou’s grin slid into a more careful study of his cousin. Twenty-one years old and Yoshitaka already held himself like a much older man, with a light in his eyes that could look childish to the unwary. It was that charisma that let him talk people into things they might otherwise never consider, and that had gotten the clutch of children around him in endless trouble. Even now, he specialized in talking people into things; he played fine games on behalf of the Kodera family, nudging the pieces on the board until they looked exactly how he wanted. 

“That might depend on much you actually want me to be a ghost,” said Jirougorou. “I am not interested in seeing the underworld yet, nor meeting the devils there for all the men I’ve killed.”

“I think the Underworld should be wary about men like you coming to greet it,” said Yoshitaka. “You might start taking over.”

Jirougorou gave his cousin a grim smile.

“What is it you want me to do, Lord Kodera?” Jirougorou said, and Yoshitaka’s eyes gleamed in the midday sunshine.

“What a ghost does best,” said Yoshitaka. “Bring bad luck to the living.”


	5. Chapter 5

When Jirougorou was seven, his four older brothers tried to turn his hair black.

They chased him around the back of the family compound in the shadow of Himeyama Castle, back then a well fortified but mostly glorified fort before its transformation into the Himeji Castle to come. Jirougorou tried to loose them in the web-like patterns of the walls, but he wasn’t fast enough at the time. They dragged him into the kitchen and ground up ink supplemented with ash, sat on his chest and rubbed his hair in it. 

“You’ll look like the rest of us, Natsuchiyo,” his fourth eldest brother told him, the one closest in age, while rubbing grime into his pale hair. “Stop struggling so much!”

Natsuchiyo bit and struggled, and his eldest brother laughed from where he was sitting on his chest.

“Its an experiment. Its not like struggling will help you,” his oldest brother said, rolling his eyes. The third eldest was helping the effort to grind up expensive ink into water, but his second eldest brother was scowling.

They didn’t really want him to stop struggling, he slowly realized. The more he struggled, the more they laughed, the longer it went on. He flopped his limbs slack and closed his eyes, partially out of exhaustion, partially out of curiosity.

Patience. 

He was seven years old, but he could outlast them all. Instead he focused on the cool feel of the kitchen floor, the smell of the charcoal, and the distant sounds of the stone workers shouting to each other as they built up the new castle walls.

The laughter slowly subsided. 

“Fine. You’re no fun,” complained his fourth brother, getting up and trying to rub the ink and ash sludge off his hands. His other brothers grumbled and gave up, slinking away as shame moved in to replace their impulsive cruelty. Only his second brother had any mind to help him up, which Natsuchiyo more or less shrugged off before finding a bucket of water. He crouched down over his reflection and scowled at the thick tangled mess of his hair. Streaks of ash and ink had stained his forehead, neck, and most of his upper kimono. The soft silk of his hair was spoiled, and he caught up big clumps of it in his hands. 

He didn’t look much more like his brothers, just dirty.

“They’re idiots,” said his second brother.

“That’s not new,” replied Natsuchiyo with all the dry sarcasm he could mine from listening to the family retainers who did the laundry and cleaning of the compound houses. “The evidence is on their hands. It’s easy to figure out who did it, I won’t have to do anything.”

“What do you mean?” said his brother, confused. “Aren’t you mad? I’ll beat them up.”

Natsuchiyo thought about it, and slowly shook his head. “It’s a bigger problem for them. I’m fine. I’m just dirty.” He looked up at his second brother, who was lingering in the shadow of the overhang. “I don’t need to turn them in. Anyone who looks at me and them can figure it out. If they wanted to mess with me, at least do it in a way no one can figure out.”

“Geeze, I don’t get you,” said his second brother.

“That’s fine. I don’t need your sympathy,” said Natsuchiyo. “I’m going to find mother to ask if she needs any help. You should come with me, so she knows you weren’t involved.”

His second brother opened his mouth, shut it, shook his head. 

“Sure, I guess,” he said.

Their mother took one look at Natsuchiyo’s hair and face and clothes and a scary quiet fell over her. She didn’t ask Natsuchiyo who had done it; she had looked at his second brother’s hands and guilty face, and then gone hunting for his other three brothers.

Natsuchiyo really hadn’t needed to do a thing.

They never laid hands on him again.


	6. Chapter 6

In the breaths between the flash of the blade. In the silent moments when Jirougorou met the eyes of the men who were about to die. In the long watches during solitary assignments while he crouched in wait, watching the distant ant movements of various soldiers of varying skill and status while he planned their deaths. When he stood on the edge of the battlefields soaked in blood and ensured that the dead were truly dead, the voice from the river whispered like a wind against his ear. It whispered things about power, about the careful movements of the spider as it sat at the center of the web.

In the East, Oda Nobunaga continued his campaigns of power. And in Himeji, the ghost of the Kuroda became the spider at the center of Kodera Yoshitaka’s web. Jirougorou often found Yoshitaka requesting his services in watching roads and hijacking messengers, where he honed the art of disguise and deception, in order to know the movements whose ripples reached them all the way in Himeji. Most of his brothers were repulsed by his growing reputation for competence no matter the cost, for the sudden departures and reappearances and subtle accolades. It didn’t bother him particularly. If he had to disguise himself as a Buddhist priest to disappear a Mori Family messenger, than he would, even if his soul was a little cursed after wards.

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of historical bits have been taken and then liberally messed with in order to imagine what mortal life was like for Rajura, including using historical figures and events for my own benefit and handwaving the rest. 
> 
> NAMES
> 
> \- Jirougorou Kuroda
> 
> According to various canon, Rajura’s original human name was Jirougorou Kuroda. Kuroda is a clan most famous for the brilliant strategist that came from them known as Kuroda Yoshitaka - one of the most famous of the historical strategists of Japanese history who helped Oda Nobunaga solidify his power. Its clearly meant to connect his whole “mess with you” style to the famous person of the Sengoku Era, but here I supposition a “what if” that he was a forgotten cousin from the distaff family of the Kurodas, as the timelines of his age, the show, and Yoshitaka’s lifespan can be made to sync up to be contemporaneous with each other. 
> 
> The name Jirougorou implies that Rajura is the fifth brother of a group of siblings, and so I posited that he has four older brothers to compete with here.
> 
> \- Natsuchiyo
> 
> In that era of Japanese history, children were given ambitious names according to a somewhat standardized styling, and then took on an adult name later in life. At least, samurai families did this. Here I gave him Natsuchiyo - Natsu for Spring, which is the Season he’s connected to in the show, and Chiyo for thousand, aka a wish for long life. It works well enough. Using someone’s childhood name could be a sign of closeness, and Rajura and Yoshitaka use each other’s childhood names here in echo of their childhood growing up together. (Yoshitaka was known as Mankichi as a kid.)
> 
> PEOPLE
> 
> \- Kuroda Yoshitaka is one of the most famous and storied strategist figures from the Sengoku Era, and has been highly romanticized. It felt appropriate to snag him here. He is referred to as "Lord Kodera" here because, before he was quite so famous, his father had earned the right to used their feudal lord's last name and it was a sign of prestige. Later, Yoshitaka took back on Kuroda, because the Kodera betrayed Oda and that was a bad feel once Oda was in power. There's a snippet that didn't fit about Yoshitaka and Jirougorou competing with each other as students as children at Himeji and I want to write that whole History AU but then this fic would never get finished lOOK HOW LONG THE NOTES ARE ALREADY.
> 
> \- Everyone else is liberally made up, except for references to "Uncle Shigetaka", who is the father of Kuroda Yoshitaka.
> 
> LOCATIONS
> 
> \- Himeji Castle is known as one of the best preserved and famous of the still extant castles in Japan, and traces it's origin to earlier than the Sengoku Period. It was originally the seat of the Kodera family, a powerful samurai clan of the time, and the Kodera's had their vassals, the Kuroda, tasked with rebuilding it into something resembling the structure you can visit today. It was famously never taken by an enemy force due to its winding curtain wall maze, which I like to imagine to have a strong influence on a young Rajura growing up there while it was being rebuilt.
> 
> Any other bits and pieces are cobbled together through some rabbit-hole research that, as usual, I didn't even use a fifth of to write this story! I loved the change to imagine a possible backstory for Rajura for my Yuletide recipient, and I hope they enjoy coming along with me. There's so much here - including research I did into the implications of the other Masho - that I hope I get the chance to revisit someday. It was a great dive into a series near and dear to my heart. I hope you enjoyed it too.


End file.
